37

Walker Percy’s first novel, The Moviegoer, concentrates round a narrator whose attraction to the screen results from a sense of an ever elusive American reality. The representation of an idealized reality on screen offers a comforting—albeit somewhat clownish—refuge against the existential anguish voiced by the narrator, to the point that it becomes the narrator’s privileged mode of perceiving and conceiving reality, engaging the novel in a hyperbolic inflation of representation, imaginary as much as verbal. This paper considers how in the novel the reality of America and self becomes identified with the mediation of their representation, precipitating the reader into a fiction paying sarcastic homage to the fictitious, somewhere between the pain of depletion and the pleasure of sheer entertainment.